Richard Ayoade and Adam Buxton

The last week of September was pretty insane. There were a couple of days where I clocked in 11 hours at work and when I wasn’t in the office, I was asleep. It always is madness at the start of semester, so goodness knows why I arranged two things to do in London. I’m clearly a masochist.

The first event was seeing Adam Buxton interviewing Richard Ayoade for a Guardian Live event where they discussed Richard’s new book The Grip of Film by Gordy LaSure. Richard is a fairly introspective and reticent interviewee, but it feels like Adam and him have a genuine friendship so it made the evening a very intimate and relaxed chat. I’m a huge fan of Richard’s films

I hadn’t heard of the venue before – the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, a church-like building with very dramatic mood lighting. Whilst is was a beautiful looking building, we did suffer from sitting in pews for 90 minutes. Husband lost feeling in his legs, my butt was in a lot of pain, and Tim’s spine turned into the spine of a much older man. Pews are not build for comfort.

In those 90 minutes, Richard and Adam chatted about his book, his films, and other random nonsense – fans of Adam’s Podcast would have recognised this as a classic Dr Buckles ramble chat. There was also a lot of talk about film, and I was pleased to hear Richard’s cinematic journey was much like my own. He didn’t watch films as a child – neither did I – so hasn’t seen a lot of the ‘classics’ that almost everyone has seen, a good example being Jurassic Park.

There has been a lot of historical Ayoade/Buxton crossover, with episodes of Gadget Man, Travel Man, Adam’s own podcast, and most recently The Crystal Maze so Richard did seem quite comfortable, but he did seem to tense up a bit when it came to the audience Q&A, particularly as the first question was a bit mean spirited for comedic value. The rest were really good questions however, which I genuinely wasn’t expecting. The audience clearly had a lot of respect for the talented filmmaker.

And at the end, a bonus book signing which I felt terribly conflicted about. It was clear Richard wasn’t looking forward to a queue of needy strangers… but I did want my book signed. I thought long and hard about what to say to him. As a fellow introvert, I could feel his discomfort and I didn’t want to add to it so simply told him I really enjoyed listening to the talk, and he promised to pass this on to Adam as well. I couldn’t have empathised with him more.

I’m looking forward to reading his book – his first book, Ayoade on Ayoade was surreally delightful and this one promises the same. It will have to sustain me until his next outing as a writer or director.